I suppose it was to be expected, but the brazenness with which extremists on both sides are trying to sabotage upcoming Israeli-Palestinian negotiations is simply breathtaking. The far more serious effort is on the Israeli side, in which activists, and even members of the government, to the right of PM Netanyahu are trying to destroy the key to the talks, which was a private understanding between Netanyahu and Pres.

A couple of months ago on the Ibishblog, I had the pleasure of describing John Mearsheimer as “the Kevorkian of Palestine” because of the dreadful, destructive advice he was offering to the Palestinian people, and now it's incumbent on me to point out that George Will is working overtime to become the Kevorkian of Israe

The pathetic and ridiculous “controversy” about the plan to build an Islamic community center a few blocks away from “Ground Zero,” the site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks has sharply brought into focus, for me at least, one of the most troubling trends in the Arab American and Muslim American communities: the scandalous lack of serious political engagement and the deterioration of virtually all national organizations that are supposed or claim to represent these communities or major constituencies within them.

In the context of the Obama administration's strong push for direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, the frankly undignified and needlessly complicating behavior of almost all the national leaderships in the Middle East has never been more apparent.

I had not intended to comment at all on the ridiculous controversy surrounding the construction of a Muslim community center near the site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but Abe Foxman, the head of the ADL, has left me no choice. Most of the opposition has come from the usual suspects: known racists, opportunistic politicians bereft of any sense of propriety and denizens of the quasi-xenophobic right such as Newt Gingrich. No surprises there.

The compulsive liars at Campus Watch just can’t stop the geyser of falsehoods that continuously erupts from their website. Last June I pointed out in an Ibishblog posting that “campus watch… had in its initial mission statement an overtly racist complaint about the number of Arab and Middle Eastern professors in Middle East studies departments,” which is absolutely true.

The PLO is now facing one of the most difficult problems it's had to deal with in quite a while, as it comes under very heavy pressure from the Obama administration and, as Pres. Abbas said at the African Union summit in Kampala two days ago, the “entire world” as well, to return to direct negotiations with Israel. For most people, although on two different sides of the equation, this is a no-brainer.

The Taffety Punk Theater Company, which recently produced Richard Byrne's superb new play Burn Your Bookes, tonight staged one of their annual “bootleg” performances at the Folger Theatre in Washington DC, in this case Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen. The performance was extraordinary, and in some ways revelatory, and was even more impressive than last year's “bootleg” Troilus and Cressida.

An Ibishblog reader asks: "The Jerusalem Post reported: 'Israel argued this week that a major human rights treaty, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, did not apply to its treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, because those areas were outside the country’s national boundaries.' This is the first time I've heard Israel define the Occupied Territories as "outside" its national boundaries.

It is frequently asked, although rarely directly to my face, “why does Ibish always talk/only seem to care (some version of that) about what Jewish Israelis will accept rather than what Palestinians want?” This question was recently repeated in a tweet, although not, as usual, directly addressed to me. Nonetheless, I do want to answer it because this confusion lies at the heart of a gulf of misunderstanding between the analyses I have been developing in recent years and much conventional wisdom among Arab-Americans and other pro-Palestinian groups.